Open Source CMS Pro

Each year, the WordPress core development team meets in person for a week to work together and discuss the vision for WordPress in the coming year. As annual events go, it’s easily my favorite. Don’t get me wrong, I love attending WordCamps and local WordPress meetups (which are awesome and you should try to attend if you are able), but at the core team meetup, the focus on working together and getting things done is unique, as is the experience of every person in the room being so highly qualified. This year, instead of just planning a core team meetup, I’m aiming a little higher and shooting for a full-on contributor/community summit.

Core code isn’t the only way to contribute to the WordPress project. We have an active theme review team, support forum volunteers, people writing documentation, plugin managers, community event organizers, translators, and more. The teams have been siloed for too long, so we’ve recently begun the process of bringing them together by having teams elect representatives to facilitate more communication between the contributor groups. These reps will form the nucleus of the contributor summit now being planned for a long weekend at the end of October in Tybee Island, GA. This is completely different from a WordCamp. It will be a combination of co-working, unconference, and discussions among the project leaders, and participation will be by invitation.

In addition to bringing together the active contributor team reps to work together, I think it’s important to include community members who don’t fall into that category (at least not yet!). Successful WordPress-based business, authors of popular plugins and themes, and people using WordPress in unexpected but intriguing ways should have a place at the table, too. That said, part of the magic of the core team meetup is the small size; it allows every voice not only to be heard, but to engage. Since this is my first attempt at bringing together so many groups and points of view, I want to try and keep it small enough to retain that personal atmosphere while at the same time ensuring that the best possible mix of people and businesses in the WordPress ecosystem is represented. This is where you come in!

Taking a cue from events with limited availability like AdaCamp (attendance) and the jQuery conference (speaker roster), I want you to nominate people and/or WordPress-based businesses to participate in the summit. Yes, you can nominate yourself.* You can nominate up to 10 additional people — be prepared to provide URLs and the reason you think they should participate. You can also nominate up to 10 WordPress-based businesses without naming individual people, so if there’s a theme or hosting company (for example) that you think should be there, you don’t need to go looking for employee names. This nomination process will hopefully ensure that we don’t overlook someone who is making a difference in our community when it comes time to issue invitations.

Nominations will be open for a week, after which the survey will be closed and the process of analyzing the results** will begin. The nominations process will lead to invitations in June, confirmations in July, planning in August and September, and the summit itself in October. Hopefully we can stream and/or record some of the activity to share online at WordPress.tv. Additional invitations may be extended up until the event if there are people/businesses that become more active in the community. If you’re thinking to yourself that maybe now’s the perfect time to start contributing time to the WordPress project, good thinking! In the meantime, if you want to weigh in, fill in the community summit nomination form. Thanks, and wish us luck!

* Nominating yourself: Do nominate yourself if you fall into one of the categories described in the post above, or if you believe that you have a unique point of view. Please do not nominate yourself if you just think it would be cool to hang out with this group. This is a working event, and everyone is expected to bring something special to the table.

** I (and/or a helpful community volunteer) will sift through the nominations and compile a shortlist of the most-nominated people/businesses and the most intriguing underdogs. This list will be reviewed by the summit planning committee (made up of team reps) to create the invitation list.

There's a new initiative in the wind to upgrade our own Drupal.org site to version 7, and look out, its flying on its own!

Yes, it's been a long time desire ever since Drupal 7 launched, but the momentum and prowess of our amazing community is finally magnetizing into action around the Upgrading Drupal.org to Drupal 7 initiative! It started with a fantastic planning and coding sprint in Portland, OR last month. (see the video) We are now full speed ahead in virtual space and IRC and the issue queues.

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There's a new initiative in the wind to upgrade our own Drupal.org site to version 7, and look out, its flying on its own!

Yes, it's been a long time desire ever since Drupal 7 launched, but the momentum and prowess of our amazing community is finally magnetizing into action around the Upgrading Drupal.org to Drupal 7 initiative! It started with a fantastic planning and coding sprint in Portland, OR last month. (see the video) We are now full speed ahead in virtual space and IRC and the issue queues.

read more

Program Seeks to bolster community education and growth with new process

Building on a successful 2011 pilot program, the Drupal Association is opening a new application process for Drupal Community Cultivation Grants. The grants will assist organizers and leaders within the community that seek to transform, support, and educate Drupal communities around the world. The 2011 program awarded more than $20,000 to 17 projects all over the world in support of camps, training, sprints and a publication.

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Program Seeks to bolster community education and growth with new process

Building on a successful 2011 pilot program, the Drupal Association is opening a new application process for Drupal Community Cultivation Grants. The grants will assist organizers and leaders within the community that seek to transform, support, and educate Drupal communities around the world. The 2011 program awarded more than $20,000 to 17 projects all over the world in support of camps, training, sprints and a publication.

read more

Reblogged from FabulousMag - Keeping you Fabulous, 24 hours a day:

You might notice we’ve been busy making a few changes to the Fabulousmag.co.uk website – to make it even easier for you to read up on all things Fabulous, every day of the week.

We’ll be bringing you MORE celeb news and photos, MORE beauty trends, MORE fashion as well as daily competitions, videos and an insight into the weird and wonderful world of…

Read more… 38 more words

Fabulous Magazine launched a new design of their site today and is now part of the WordPress.com VIP Hosting family! We're #TotallyFabObsessed :)

Ready to become a VIP Services Client? Some of the world’s biggest brands rely on WordPress.com VIP Services.

The Registered Joomla User Group team are pleased to announce that we are making some changes to enhance the relationship between the team and JUG coordinators.
 
* We have made a gallery page for the people in the team know who we are and what their special skills are.

* We are tweaking the JUG directory to ensure it stays up to date and is easier to handle that includes removing the deadwood and locating JUGs who have lost their way a bit.

* The rules are being translated to native languages similar to the German and Spanish ones already made. If you can assist in any way, please let us know.

* We will organise a regular JUG news spots and ask groups to have a general round up in the Registered JUG Google group. We suggest all sign up with the group,

Other behind the scenes improvements are :

* Have an ideal  7 day response limit from application to approval. (But this is not possible in all cases).

* Update and rebuild the JUG welcome pack
 
Thanks for reading and commenting in the people.joomla.org group .

Liam
 

 
 

There’s a lot of interest in the upcoming “Theme Customizer” which will be released in WordPress 3.4 (currently in beta 4). The Theme Customizer will make it easy for users to customize their theme and see the results real-time without opening or refreshing a new browser window to see them.

Otto walks us through a preview of what the feature may look like (final version subject to change) with a screencast of it running locally:

So, WordPress 3.4 has this nifty new feature you can find on the main Theme selection page. It’s a link next to each theme labeled “Customize”. This is the new Theme Customizer, and it’s way cool.

Otto also goes into depth how theme developers will be able to take advantage of the Theme Customizer in their theme development in a very detailed post with code samples for the settings and controls developers will be able to use.

Check out “How to leverage the Theme Customizer in your own themes” on Ottopress.

Rewrite Rules Inspector is a simple development tool for viewing all of the rewrite rules registered with your site. It’s been available for VIPs hosted on WordPress.com for a while — today it’s available for download from the WordPress.org repository.

Specifically, the Rewrite Rules Inspector helps you:

• View a listing of all your rewrite rules.
• See which rewrite rules match a given URL (and the priorites they match in).
• Filter by different sources of rewrite rules.
• Know when rewrite rules are missing in the database by showing an error message.

Feel free to fork the plugin in Github — pull requests are always welcome. Hit us with feedback, questions, bug reports, and feature requests in the forums.

Canada has just launched Olympic.ca, the official site for the Canadian Olympic team, on WordPress. As the London 2012 games approach, they’ll be updating with their official athletes’ profiles and other news.

Visit Olympic.ca.

Are you a publisher working with WordPress? We want to hear from you.
Want WordPress for your site? Get.WP.com

Van Heusen has launched on WordPress, hosted right here at WordPress.com VIP, with a site as stylish as their clothing. Welcome to the WordPress family!

Visit Van Heusen.com.

Ready to become a VIP Services Client? Some of the world’s biggest brands rely on WordPress.com VIP Services.

Ad Code Manager is a plugin designed to help you deal with ad codes, those short snippets of Javascript used to display advertisements on your website. This week, Rinat Khaziev of Doejo, Jeremy Felt of 10up, and I are excited to bring you version 0.2.

It’s chock full of these new features:

• Completely reworked user interface, one that now looks and feels like much of the rest of the WordPress admin.
• Abstracted ad network logic, so you can integrate additional ad networks. Currently, Ad Code Manager fully supports Double Click for Publishers. Pull requests with support for other ad networks are always welcome.
• In-plugin contextual help to get you properly configured.
• Priorities for ad codes, which allow you to work around conflicts.
• An [acm-tag] shortcode for placing ad codes within posts.
• A widget for placing ad codes in widget areas. Thanks to Justin Sternburg at WebDevStudios for the contribution.

We’ve also fixed these bugs:

• Enabled using ad codes with empty conditionals.
• Setting the logical operator from OR to AND now results in the expected behavior.

Ad Code Manager v0.2 is already installed on WordPress.com VIP, and available to download for WordPress.org installs. Please report any bugs, feature requests, or questions in the WordPress.org forums. Or fork the plugin on Github and follow our development blog to help with future improvements.

We are pleased to introduce Marta Betts as the Marketing Communications Manager at the Drupal Association - our first-ever dedicated marketing resource.  

Marta joined the Drupal Association as the lead of Marketing/Communications for DrupalCon Denver earlier this year, and is continuing with the Association to lead the efforts on Marketing/Communications for all Drupal Association activities. She will be focusing on raising awareness of the DA, as well as marketing the many programs and events that the DA managers. She is energized by the passion, excitement, and enthusiasm in our community.  

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MTV is one of the few TV channels that is truly famous around the world. Broadcasting in over 60 countries, MTV has has had a profound impact on the music industry and popular culture.

MTV recently re-launched their website in Greece using the power of Joomla: http://www.mtvgreece.gr.

This article is an excerpt from the recent WordPress 3 Cookbook.  - ed.

Save time by using WordPress shortcodes

When you know that you’ll have to insert the same code snippets on many posts, you should definitely create a shortcode. Introduced in WordPress 2.5, the shortcode API provides a simple set of functions for creating macro codes for use in post content. A classic shortcode looks like this: 

[author_info]

Shortcodes can also handle attributes. For example:

[download file="myfile.zip"]

Shortcodes can used to wrap, or embed, content:

[mycode]Some Content[/mycode]

In this recipe, we show you how you can create your own shortcodes and then use them in posts.

Getting ready

This recipe can be achieved with any WordPress theme. You don’t need anything except your favorite WordPress theme and a text editor.

How to do it…

Creating shortcodes is relatively simple. For your first shortcode, let’s create a simple one that will display a disclaimer.

We begin by adding a simple PHP function to your theme’s functions.php file. To do so, follow these steps:

1. Open for editing the functions.php file from your active theme.
2. Add the following code to the file:

[crayon-4fac909668ec4/]

You’re now able to use the disclaimer shortcode. To employ the shortcode, follow these steps:

1. Write a new post, or edit an existing one.
2. Click the HTML tab to switch the editor to HTML mode.
3. Insert the shortcode you just created:

[disclaimer]

4. Click the Update button.

If you visit the page you just edited, instead of seeing [disclaimer], you will see the text you put into the function.

How it works…

In this example, we created a very basic function and then used the add_shortcode() function to turn it into a shortcode. The add_shortcodes() function takes two arguments—the first is the shortcode name, and the second is the function to call when the shortcode will be used.

Every time WordPress displays a post, the system automatically looks for shortcodes and, when it finds one, executes the associated function.

Enabling the use of shortcodes in widgets

While WordPress shortcodes are incredibly useful, sadly, they are only available inside of posts and pages. In this recipe, we show you how to extend the power of shortcodes by enabling their use in widgets.

Getting ready

This recipe requires modifying the functions.php file of your theme. This will work with any theme, so all you need is access to your theme files and a code editor.

How to do it…

1. Access your active WordPress theme.
2. Open the functions.php file for editing.
3. Add the following line of code to the file:

[crayon-4fac909668f0a/]

4. Save the file.

That’s all it takes. Now you can add shortcodes directly into a Text widget and the system will display the proper output.

How it works…

The line of code added to the functions.php file simply allows the shortcodes to be properly interpreted by the system when they appear inside of widget content areas. Thereafter, normal shortcode usage applies and the system will display the proper output, rather than the shortcode text.

Use a Shortcode to Add notes to your posts

If you are working with others to create content for your site, there are times when it would be nice to be able to leave private notes concerning the revision of the content items. In this recipe, we look at using a shortcode to enable administrators to post private messages on content items. The messages can only be seen by other users who have the permission to publish posts, and even then, only when they are logged in. Public visitors to the site and registered users who do not have permissions to publish content will not see the messages. This gives you an easy way make comments to the author and provide suggestions and feedback directly on the content item.

Getting ready

All you need to execute this recipe is a code editor and access to your theme files. We will be working with the functions.php file from your active theme.

How to do it…

First, let’s create the shortcode:

1. Access the active theme files on your WordPress installation.
2. Open for editing the functions.php file.
3. Add to the file the following lines of code:

[crayon-4fac909668f4c/]

4. Save the file.

The shortcode is now ready to use. Next, let’s create a unique style for the note so that it is easily visible. Follow these steps:

1. Open for editing the style.css file of your active theme.
2. Add the following selector to the file:

[crayon-4fac909668f8c/]

3. Save the style.css file.

The apply the new admin note shortcode to a post, follow these steps:

1. Log in to your WordPress dashboard.
2. Open a content item for editing, or create a new item.
3. Click on the HTML tab to switch to the HTML editor.
4. Type your message into the editing window, using a format like this:

[crayon-4fac909668fcb/]

5. Click the Update button to save the content item.

How it works…

We started in the functions.php file, where we created a new function called admin_note(). In that function we tell the system to check whether the active user has the permission to publish posts and if so, we show that user any content inside the adminnote shortcode. Next, we edited the style.css file to provide a selector for the class we used to wrap the $content in the functions.php file.

 

 

The content in this article comes from Chapter 4 “Customizing Content Display” of the WordPress 3 Cookbook (Packt Publishing). The WordPress 3 Cookbook is authored by Ric Shreves. The book looks at common issues in WordPress and provides examples of techniques to address them. The book was released in December, 2011. You can order the book online from your favorite retailer. You can learn more by visiting the WordPress 3 Cookbook page on this website.

 

Working with WordPress Shortcodes is a post from Open Source CMS Pro - CMS books, resources & commentary

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We're excited to welcome Tatiana (tvn) as the Association's first Drupal.org project coordinator. Keeping inline with our objective to make Drupal.org an amazing place for developers, site builders and contributors to collaborate we have begun to make investments to support the community.

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Drupal.org and its sub-sites (api.drupal.org, groups.drupal.org, etc) will be going down for 20 minutes Monday, May 7, 5:00 PDT (May 8, 00:00 UTC). This maintenance window will be used to upgrade our single sign on system. Please follow the @drupal_infra twitter account for updates during the downtime and thanks for your patience!

Sites will remain functional for the majority of the scheduled downtime, but everyone will be logged out. You may not be able to log into sub-sites for a few minutes as the update is rolled out.

We are excited about our first conference in Latin America to be held in São Paulo, Brazil from December 6-8, 2012. This is a vibrant, new and growing Drupal community, and conference planning is well underway and the venue will be announced soon. Speakers from all around the world will be welcome to submit their proposals, as soon as the call for papers opens in the coming weeks.

Conference co-leads, Fabiano Sant'Ana and Fernando Paredes Garcia, in connection with the Drupal Association’s DrupalCon team, are looking for a dynamic group of volunteers to help plan this first-time event and a design company to theme the conference. 

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On the first Thursday of every month the Association hosts an open Virtual Meetup (formerly Town Hall). These meetups are designed to provide an opportunity for the community to connect with the Association and to learn more about who we are and what we are working on, while also providing an opportunity to offer suggestions and feedback.

We are currently deep in the middle of upgrading Drupal.org to Drupal 7 and there are a lot of questions about the status of that upgrade. An update of the project will not be ready in time for Thursday's virtual meetup so we are going to reschedule the meetup for Tuesday, May 8th, 2012 at 6pm UTC (10am PT). Rescheduling will allow us to have an update from the project team, an update from the Drupal.org office hours, and prepare your comments for the board meeting the following day.

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Less bugs, more polish, the same beta disclaimers. Download, test, report bugs. Thanks much. /ryan #thewholebrevitything